Circle the wagons!

Chief freetard, Richard Stallman, is warning that cloud computing is a trap. Recent actions and announcements by Google do not make it easier.  The problem is, of course, what is a cloud? This site is on a Debian machine, running Drupal with MySQL. All free software. I do pay for hosting, so am I in the cloud? Would it be the same if I used Amazon Elastic Cloud, using the same software, or on my own machine?

I think Stallman is referring more to the fact the we could be entrapped by letting our data and processes be managed by proprietary software in the cloud in the same way we have on our own servers, laptops and desktops. In this he is quite correct. Consider the work of the Data Liberation Front (which, by the way belongs to Google), it will help you download your data in a readable format which you can then use elsewhere, but what about applications which provide a service in which the process might be more important than the data stored?

An example is feedburner, that helps you syndicate the contents from your site, analyze it's usage and add additional syndication channels beside RSS (such as Twitter and email). As an added bonus, it offloads some of your bandwidth, and you can link it to Google adwords. Mind you, this is a service, and not software as such. Had it been available as an open-source application it would probably have made no difference, as the service itself would still be a black box. The same is true about Facebook's identity management and, of course, it's failing (via Ira)

So what should we do in the RMS world? Circle the wagons (and since this is web 2.0 times, dance naked on the wagons canopy):

• Use your open-source CMS systems on Linux (BSD is OK, I guess), and connect to other sites using pingbacks and trackbacks.
• Install EyeOS on your servers
• Limit the interaction between web services. 
• Use openID.

• Be paranoid.

Jokes aside. Figure out what you can do on the cloud but more important, figure out why certain tasks make more sense (for you) to be handled on the cloud, and which should be handled locally. The responsibility, at the end of the day, is yours.

Expect security models to change. Most sites security models are tied in to their business models. Those are still based on a closed garden environment, not only for the user data, but also the user identity. Once social networks open to external identity management, the landscape will change. This will benefit not only the users, but also the vendors and providers, as it will reduce their administrative overhead and user support. If I can host and manage my identity and credentials, I will have better control over my data, and the liability of the vendors will be reduced.